Activities

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents an audiovisual series on the relationship between video and music curated by Bob Nickas, a pioneer in experimental video clips during the early years of MTV in the 1980s. At the end of the 70s, the punk, no wave and performance art era, there was a general conviction that video clips had a commercial function only aimed at promoting and selling records. Art never formed part of the original equation. However, at times, music groups from the art world would choose an artist to direct their videos and they would go on to produce something that was much more than a commercial tool, raising the level of the invention and the visual sophistication. One such case is the collaboration between Sonic Youth and the artists Tony Oursler (New York, 1957) and Richard Kern (North Carolina 1954), and with the filmmakers Todd Haynes (Los Angeles, 1961) and Harmony Korine (Bolinas, 1973), to give only one example. In contrast, since the 1990s, the influence of music on young video artists has been considerable. For many of them, music and sound are central elements in their work, when they are not forming the very subject of the piece.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía has chosen nine films from contemporary cinema as part of the summer film programme presented as an alternative to more commercial circuits. Some of the most emblematic films from contemporary French cinema are represented by directors like Jean-Luc Godard (Paris, 1930), Agnès Varda (Brussels, 1928) and the couple Jean-Marie Straub (Metz, 1933) / Danièle Huillet (Paris, 1936 - Cholet, 2006). Bruce Weber (Greensburg, 1946) and Matthew Barney (San Francisco, 1967) offer alternative poetics from American film, while the acclaimed Jia Zhangke (Fenyang, 1970) comes to the museum’s screens with his tale of a changing China, The World (2004).

The work of Javier Viver (Madrid, 1971) takes advantage of a variety of media including sculpture, photography and video. Appropriating resources from industry and show business, he creates interdisciplinary spectacles about exile and the ephemeral nature of things that highlight the desolation and great internal contradictions of modern man.

Since its earliest days, British television has served as a reference point for creative dialogue between contemporary art and television. As early as 1938, the artist and critic John Piper (Epsom, 1903; - Fawley Bottom, 1992) was appearing in a studio to talk about modern art. Today, the means of broadcast and reception have become decentralised and fragmented. Television as the supreme medium of directed mass culture is in decline and its audience, which was once captive, is dispersed among hundreds of satellite and cable channels, DVDs, videogames and 3G mobile phones. The moment when leisure time was filled with the great cultural television projects that so distinguished the second half of the 20^th century will not be repeated. Remote Control features a selection of some of the most historical moments in the history of the relationship between art and television.

El futuro más acá is a film series that brings together a selection of Mexican films that between 1945 and 1980 explored science fiction themes from a point of view very different from that of the discourse dominating the genre in the United States.

Prison of Love is an interdisciplinary project that raises the possibility of artistically and culturally representing a complex set of aspects around the topic of domestic/gender violence. The title is not accidental; it is taken from an epistolary novel with a tragic end by Diego de San Pedro (Seville, 1492), whose beliefs and point of view could well symbolise, both literally and figuratively, fear of the patriarchal system in the 21^st century. With five interconnected sections (a film and video programme, web project, performance piece, conferences and a publication) and conceived as a space distinguished by its diversity of opinions and points of view, Prison of Love runs the risk of being perceived as lacking rigor, confronting as it does a topic that is both broad and brutal. Far from assuming that ‘anything goes’, this project, which was put together over a period of almost two years, is based on the concept that artistic and cultural codes are collective representations and that their form and content are shaped by and for the social order.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents a retrospective of the work of Chip Lord (Cleveland, 1944) a pioneer in video creation in the United States and co-founder of the art and architecture collective Ant Farm, created to map the American psyche of the 1940s and 50s without losing sight of the rapid technological changes of the post-war period. The works done by Ant Farm, whose members (co-founder Doug Michels and Curtis Schreier and Hudson Marquez, who joined later) came from the field of architecture, treated the media in a way that differed significantly from other video collectives in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Decidedly interdisciplinary, the group produced works that combined performance art, media language, sculpture and graphic and architectural design and usually exhibited the countercultural ideology of the era with a free-and-easy sense of humour.

The work of Breda Beban (Serbia) - born in the former Yugoslavia and living in London since 1991 - focuses on photography, film and video. Her films are romantic reports, halfway between fiction and documentary, on the authenticity, intimacy and vulnerability found on the margins of great stories about culture, geopolitics and gender questions.

The work of David Lamelas (Buenos Aires, 1946) is unique in that it unites formal objectivism with the embodiment of the artist’s subjective experience and is marked by his time in different cities like Los Angeles, London, Paris and Berlin. This series, structured into three programmes, offers a tour through these cities as they appear in his work at different significant moments of his life between his break with Buenos Aires and his return there.

This year, Film and Almost Film presents 33 pieces, most of which were created between 2002 and 2004 by visual artists and Spanish and international filmmakers.

Stan Brakhage: in Search of the Sublime

This series is dedicated to the audiovisual work done by artists who lived near the events of 9/11 and who documented the before and after of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on Tuesday 11 September 2001, which the world witnessed on their television screens. Since then, the unrepeatable moment that the airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center has been rebroadcast endlessly, becoming fixed in the collective memory, condensing the innumerable effects of Al Qaeda’s attack against the United States.

A Zone of Crossovers is a series dedicated to the Belgian film and video scene, a heterogeneous place where extremely different approaches, forms and strategies come together. Without a doubt, this circumstance reflects and is a symptom of the complex historical, political and cultural reality of this small country which, since its founding in 1830, has embodied a commitment to neutralise territorial conflicts between adjacent powers: Germany, England, France and Holland. The setting for historical clashes between the Latin and Germanic worlds, Belgium is also a space characterised by a rich cultural hybridisation in which the appearance of figures like René Magritte, Marcel Broodthaers and Panamarenko cannot be considered a coincidence.

Describing Love (in 7 Fragments) presents some twenty videos and seven films that, using different moments and contexts, reflect on love and are related to seven ideas taken from the book by Roland Barthes (Cherbourg, 1915 - Paris, 1980), Fragments d’un discourse amoureux. The book is structured around topics (arranged from A to Z) that the author defines both theoretically and personally. As in the book, the programme follows Barthes’ ideas in alphabetical order, as he presents them in the original French, thus questioning the linearity of the narrative of the subject’s experience and his love affair, providing a portrait (which is structural more than biographical) in which the loving subject speaks about himself in a confrontation with the loved object, who does not speak.

This series is dedicated to the work of artist, photographer and director Ulrike Ottinger (Konstanz, 1942), one of the most emblematic figures of the New German Cinema, paradoxically overlooked by official histories. Ottinger began working in film in the 1960s (during which time she studied photography, history and ethnology at the side of teachers including John Friedlaender, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Bourdieu), although she did not make her first film as a director until 1972, when she directed Laocoon & Sons with Tabea Blumenschein (Konstanz, 1952). The film premiered at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin in 1973. With Madame X - Eine absolute Herrscherin (1977), a film about a female pirate, Ottinger revealed her interest in questions of gender, although in the 1980s she distanced herself from traditional feminist paradigms to interrogate the existence of a ‘female’ aesthetic, an alternative way of seeing the world, and begin to explore new discourses about identity. Her Berlin Trilogy marked a critical moment in this turn, since in it she tackled questions like androgyny and dandyism using a somewhat queer sensibility. From this point of view, Ottinger’s work has the special distinction of re-appropriating the aesthetics of narcissism from a feminist discourse, proposing a renegotiation of subjectivity and going beyond the more traditional debates in feminist theory on gender and sexuality.

Manuel Olveira (Puerto del Son, 1964), the director de Hangar, talks about the project Procesos abiertos, which was designed to draw attention to the production processes in contemporary art through a series of activities, a documentation centre and a blog. For six months (from January to July 2004) and with the participation of eleven artists, a support framework will be created in and with the public space, intended to be more of a network of relationships within a context than a physical framework.

Valie Export (Linz, 1940) has, since the 1960s, served as a reference point for conceptual and feminist art with her reflections on identity, the use of the body and sexuality and its relation to the media. Her work, which is formally heterogeneous, spans film, video, performance art, photography, drawing and installations, formats that converge in a point of view that is radically opposed to the roles that the sexist conception inherent in western culture grants women.

Originally, hacker was a word that designated someone who made furniture using an axe. In the cyber world, however, it has acquired numerous meanings related to the world of artificial intelligence and its uses on the Internet, from the positive connotation when referring to a person who enjoys exploring programmable systems in great detail and how to expand their possibilities, to the unfavourable meaning used to refer to people who maliciously try to discover delicate information by manipulating programming systems. Hackers. The Art of Abstraction is a series of documentaries, conferences and performance pieces dedicated to the hacker phenomenon and culture that highlights some key questions that arose alongside the earliest appearances of computer ‘piracy’: Are the security systems guaranteed by large corporations and web servers really stable? To what extent can hacker practices be categorised as meaningless vandalism? What lies in these practices of civil disobedience?

What is the tunche? The tunche is a figure that has never been seen but is there. No visual representation of it exists, but it is imagined as a nocturnal bird. Its whistle is sweet and melancholy. When its whistle is short, it is a tormented soul that escorts; when it is long, it is an evil spirit that haunts, an omen of misfortune and death. Part of Peruvian folklore, the tunche is a feared and respected presence in the collective mindset.

This film and video programme presents the complete filmography of the Vietnamese filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha (Hanoi, 1952), one of the most forceful voices in post-colonial and post-feminist discourse in the 1980s and 90s. Born in Hanoi, she moved to the United States in 1970, where she studied music composition, ethnomusicology and French literature at the University of Illinois. Her film work has been highly recognised in the field of documentary, where she has adopted a critical ethnographic eye with respect to the narrative of the traditional documentary, which she deconstructs in her films. The technique of documentary film often contains the illusion of offering an objective and impartial look at the observed subject. The filmmaker, like the anthropologist, usually enjoys a privileged position, a distance above the observed subject that supposedly guarantees the neutrality of the process and the document. Part of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s work consists of challenging this proposition, revealing the strategies and methods used in the specific relationships between the documentary maker and the exploited or oppressed subjects who are observed in a hieratical power structure with an underlying authoritarian discourse about the ‘other’. In her films, meaning is constructed, not given. Thus she shows that commentary is not impartial, but rather an interpretation open to all its inherent complexity.

The work of Joan Rabascall (Barcelona, 1935), one of the Spanish artists who founded the Sociological Art movement in Paris in 1974, grapples with the messages contained in the manipulated media images that we are fed every day. Drawing on publicity, the press and television, he reveals the failures in the system through works with minimal decontextualisation and subsequent resignifying.

A Brief History of Video Art in Holland is a video programme curated by Sebastián López, director of the Gate Foundation. It features the participation of 30 artists who are already prominent in the history of the audiovisual medium because of their important contributions, both to the development of video and to the issues that characterised the visual arts between 1972 and 2002. The exhibition charts the diversity and variety of the artists who have drawn the history of Dutch video art without constrictions in a medium supposedly without borders, opening up numerous cross-cultural connections and providing an open space for discussion where the artistic interrogates the cultural. The exhibition thus contributes to establishing new parameters to better understand the video work of the last three decades and the historical context in which these works were produced.

Adolescents. Films and Videos for/about Girls and Boys is a programme of underground films that deal with the problems faced by adolescents and the challenges entailed in reaching the earliest years of adult life. Despite the difficulties involved in this vital phase for most people who experience it, as series curator Susana Blas notes, “we have gone from thinking of youth as an illness that is quickly cured to completely sublimating it. It seems that nobody wants to let go of this young way of living, which for many people has become a way of feeling, from being radical to just adopting their aesthetics and fashions. Today, you can find 40-year-old adolescents.” Drawing on this observation, the series is designed to break with the most perverse aspects involved in the sublimation of adolescence and unearth some of the clichés that have emerged around this difficult and venerated time of life. At the same time, it is introducing audiences to the work of a series of essential artists in the contemporary audiovisual world.

Focus: Video Library is a film and video exhibition created for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía by the Galleria d'Arte Moderna (GAM) in Turin. The GAM has created a museum video collection, which could not be found in Italy until well into the 1990s, and has managed to build up a large collection of works that are now available to the public. The collection includes pieces by artists like Vito Acconci (New York, 1940), Dan Graham (Urbana, 1942), Marina Abramović (Belgrade, 1946) and Martha Rosler (New York, 1943) from the era when video was first being used as an art medium, works by John Baldessari (National City, 1931), Marcel Odenbach (Cologne, 1953) and Ana Mendieta (Havana, 1948 - New York, 1985) from the 1980s and more recent pieces from Sadie Benning (Madison, 1973) and Lydie Jean-Dit-Panel (Montbéliard, 1968). The selection also contains video works by young Italian artists, including Paolo Chiasera (Bologna, 1978) and Marcello Maloberti (Codogno, 1966), among others.

With Single-channel, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents a comprehensive review of the Spanish video created between 1996 and 2003, looking at 46 pieces that will be previewed on the museum façade during the days of the ARCO fair, along with the programme The Swiss Screen. The list includes some very well-known artists such as Txomin Badiola (Bilbao, 1957), Jordi Colomer (Barcelona, 1962) and Eulàlia Valldosera (Vilafranca del Penedès, 1963) alongside emerging figures who are being closely followed by audiences attuned to the latest trends such as Olga Adelantado (Valencia, 1970), Pilar Albarracín (Seville, 1968), Carles Congost (Olot, 1970), Dora García (Valladolid, 1965) and Fernando Sánchez Castillo (Madrid, 1970).

How should a programme that is both personal and at the same time representative of Swiss art in the field of video be approached? How should the selection be organised given the particular context in which it will be presented, i.e., in the city of Madrid for a series of Swiss art events presented alongside ARCO 2003 and at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía?

Film and Almost Film 2001 presents a selection of 22 works by experimental film directors and artists who, influenced by film and television, have taken a new approach to their work in an attempt to create a new genre of ‘art film’. This genre has traditionally been linked, both in terms of technique and narrative, to European experimental film, which, produced with low or medium budgets, has tried to reorient film practices and aesthetics. Nonetheless, in the last few years, the connotations inherent in the idea of ‘art film’ have grown.

Interference is a programme of slides, documentaries and videos that tracks the evolution of the work by Perry Bard (Quebec, 1944) since she moved to New York in 1981. At the time, she was struck by the sight of homeless people sleeping in cardboard box shelters and the strong contrast with the surrounding sheets of glass and marble for which the city is known. Since then, Bard’s work has focused on the tenuous limits between public and private.

Historias sin argumento is a programme that presents the different stages in the filmography of Pere Portabella (Figueres, 1929) as a filmmaker and producer from the 1950s to today. His production company 59 Films was the driving force behind some of the cornerstone productions of Spain’s post-civil war critical realism (Los golfos, Carlos Saura; El cochecito, Marco Ferreri; Viridiana, Luis Buñel). At the end of the 1960s he was involved with the formation of the Barcelona School. His early films as a director, written in collaboration with the poet Joan Brossa (Barcelona, 1919-1998) (No compteu amb els dits and Nocturn 29), combine the cultural inheritance of the avant-garde with the languages that were coming onto the scene and shaking up the 1960s, and became known as ‘new cinema’. He was one of the key figures in the development of independent, alternative and clandestine cinema whose work was inextricably linked to his political opposition to Franco’s regime. Films like Vampir-Cuadecuc (1970), Umbracle (1971-1972) and his series of short films about Joan Miró (1969-1973), along with his participation in the Grup de Treball, were radical interventions in the cinema and art worlds.

Liliana Porter (Buenos Aires, 1941) is the only female Latin American artist whose work is included in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía’s audiovisual collection. For You/Para usted (1999) has its origins in a photographic series the artist did using toys and figurines going about their daily business, which Porter reformulated adding sound, rhythm and narration. From this point of view, the piece is closely connected to her earlier work in painting, drawing and photography, which already manifested the peculiar aspects of her personal narrative, far removed from traditional formulas. As Ana Tiscornia has noted, For You/Para usted is another step in the destabilisation of the conventional ideas of reality that prevails in Liliana Porter’s work. The video, originally shot in 16 mm, craftily uses the basic characteristics of the medium - emphasising time and movement - to present a scene that takes place almost completely off stage, in the mind of the viewer. In this presentation, Porter analyses her piece and illustrates the relationship between the video and the context of her work.

Inspired by the short story Beatles contra Duran-Duran, by the Cuban writer Mirta Yáñez (Havana, 1947), Madagascar (1994) by Fernando Pérez (Havana, 1944) revolves around the contradictions experienced by a university professor who has lost the ability to dream in Cuba during the 1990s economic crisis known as the ‘special period’ and her teenage daughter, who dreams of travelling to Madagascar. Their relationship, which is full of misunderstandings and mutual alienation, is depicted as an exercise in human communication. Its cinematic expressiveness, aesthetic pursuit and the humanity of its characters make Madagascar not only an innovative film, but also an important reading of the cinema of the times. This subtle story about the conflict between tradition and modernity has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Special Jury Prize and Special Cuban Critics Prize at the 16^th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema (1994) and the World Cinema Prize for Best Latin American Film at the 12^th Sundance Film Festival.

With B&W and Colour. Latin America: cinema, video and multimedia, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents an up-to-date panorama of Latin American audiovisual art along with an exhibition entitled Agitation as Daily Ritual - Cartographies of Desire that brings 30 films and videos made by female artists between 1965 and 1987 to Spain for the first time. B&W and Colour crosses conventional boundaries, not only because of its unusual nature, variety and the contents of the selected works, but because of its pluralist inclination. Most of these pieces deal with the fragmentation of society into different ethnic, social and cultural groups and show us how to decode a culture that seems closer than it really is.

Cameras, screens, computers, recorders, photocopiers, printers, scanners, holograms, magnetic material and CDs are a regular part of the contemporary scene as both instruments and ubiquitous, versatile media. The electronic and media arts are not the result of the seduction of novelty, but rather a consequence of responsible proximity to what is happening in the world. The arts have adopted instruments from the information and communication industries and factories and given them other functions and configurations that make abundant use of inter-, multi- and transmedia amalgams.

Calculated Cinema is a film and video series that focuses its attention on the pioneering use of computers and electronics in experimental films as expressed in works by filmmakers like Oskar Fischinger (Gelnhausen, 1900 - Los Angeles, 1967), Mary Ellen Bute (Houston, 1906 - New York, 1983), John (Pasadena, 1917 - Los Angeles, 1995) and James Whitney (Pasadena, 1921 - Los Angeles, 1982), Jordan Belson (Chicago, 1926 - San Francisco, 2011), Peter Kubelka (Vienna, 1934), Werner Nekes (Erfurt, 1944), Larry Cuba (Atlanta, 1950) and Robert Darroll (England, 1946).

This programme presents a broad and representative cross-section of the work of Robert Cahen (Valence, 1945), a filmmaker, photographer and composer who has made more than fifty films and videos since 1973, when he first became interested in the audiovisual arts after meeting Pierre Schaeffer (Nancy, 1910 - Aix, 1995), with whom he studied Musique concrète at the Conservatoire de Paris. Cahen finds inspiration in images and memories, in the sensations of travelling, the world of theatre, dance and art, and in the visual and sound experiments that he has been conducting with electronic images and Musique concrète for more than thirty years. In every case, his extraordinary knowledge of the music world shapes the work, its conception and its rhythm.

Twenty-five years separate the first video work by Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942), Acciones (a study of the so-called sub-senses carried out from a series of experiments done between 1971 and 1973), and his latest episode of Political Advertisements (1984-1996), the fourth piece dedicated to analysing election campaigns in the United States, where he has lived since the 1970s. This selection presents these twenty-five years of video work by Muntadas, a pioneer in new audiovisual and electronic media and one of the most important directors, both nationally and internationally. The programme includes all of his video work, 21 single-channel pieces organised into nine programmes arranged chronologically, allowing the viewer to follow the evolution of his interest in the context of the media, which has influenced all of his work.

The film cycle, About Federico García Lorca features the latest audiovisual pieces dedicated to the writer in Spain, as well as the few film images that have been preserved of him, interviews with family members and friends and witnesses to the intense and passionate life and work of this universal poet.

Video dance is usually linked to the origins of video and its relationship to contemporary dance, following the evolution of creators, artistic languages and the use of technology in the search for common ground where the two forms of expression complement each other in the communication of ideas and creation of emotions. However, the relationship between dance and image is not exclusive to the last quarter century; in fact, since its earliest days, a special attraction has existed between film and dance that today, after nearly one hundred years, still merits analysing.